IJCER (www.ijceronline.com) International Journal of computational Engineering research

International Journal Of Computational Engineering Research (ijceronline.com) Vol. 2 Issue.4

A Technique for Importing Shapefile to Mobile Device in a Distributed
System Environment.
1
1
Manish Srivastava, 2Atul Verma, 3Kanika Gupta
Academy of Business Engineering and Sciences,Ghaziabad, 201001,India
2
Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, Devghat Jhalwa ,IIITA,Allahabad, 211012, India
3
Academy of Business Engineering and Sciences,Ghaziabad,201001, India

Abstract
Mobile GIS emerged in the 1990s, with integration of GPS is one of the leading technique. It is a Location Based Services
which can be defined as any application that extends spatial information processing or GIS capabilities to end users (based on
their geographic location) (ESRI 2000 & 2001d). In other words it can be used to gather information from any place, and in no
time. It’s where wireless and GIS technologies meet on the Web and it is changing the way businesses and individuals
operate”(ESRI 2001a). The technology of mobile devices has been improving since 2000.The various improvements has
resulted in developing a high promising technology by taking into account issues like

 Portability
• ‘Ruggedness’ and
• All-day battery life.

Presently we are designing a mobile application for importing shapefile to a mobile device which on other hand support
geospatial vector data format of geographic information systems software. It was firstly developed and regulated by ESRI A
"shapefile" commonly refers to a collection of files with ".shp", ".shx", ".dbf". To import a shapefile we need to use an open
source software known as geoserver which helps to fetch the desired vector image.
With the help of wireless technology like Bluetooth we can import shapefile to mobile even if the shapefile is located on
different system. This will help in fetching information associated within the shapefile ,thus helping to obtained important
information without considering its place of storage and location. In this work we have taken MNNIT Allahabad as area of
research.

Keywords: Shape file, geoserver, personnel digital assistant (pda) and wireless technology
Introduction
Mobile GIS is the expansion of GIS technology from the office into the field. A mobile GIS enables field-based personnel to
capture, store, update, manipulate, analyze, and display geographic information. Mobile GIS integrates one or more of the
following technologies:
Mobile Devices,
 Global Positioning Systems, and
 Wireless Communications for Internet GIS access
 GIS applications are software applications that process large amounts of geospatial data, involving heavy computations.
Traditionally, these applications have resided on high performance workstations and servers equipped with the necessary
resources: large amounts of primary and secondary memory, fast CPUs and graphics processors, and large screens for
displaying the data. The recent decade, however, has seen a move of GIS applications onto smaller platforms, including
mobile platforms such as personal digital assistants (PDAs). These platforms offer a number of attractive features, primary
among which are their extreme mobility: because of its small size, a PDA can be carried and used practically anywhere[1].

Issn 2250-3005(online) August| 2012 Page 1160


Figure 1: Overall Architecture of Mobile GIS (Ali Monsourian et.al 2008)
M-GIS Components
A Mobile Geographic Information System (M-GIS) project consists of several components which represent individual
technological fields conceptual to the architectural design of the project (Sarjakoski & Lehto 2003). Client components consist
of all the physical mobile devices that are compatible with the front-end requirements of an M-GIS application; in other
words, they are the mobile devices that the application can run on. The communication technologies and infrastructure
components ("middleware") allow for the transmission of requests and responses between the client and server components.
The server components are all the hardware and software involved in serving the client-side of the M-GIS project on the web
server and the map server.
Importing Shapefile in Mobile
Basic Aspect of Shapefile
The ESRI Shape file or simply a shape file is a popular geospatial vector data format for geographic information systems
software. It is developed and regulated by ESRI as a (mostly) open specification for data interoperability among ESRI and
other software products. A "shape file" commonly refers to a collection of files with ".shp", ".shx", ".dbf"[2].
The Shape file Format
ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) is a leading developer of GIS software and the Shape file format used by
their products is one of the most popular mediums for storing vector map data. An ESRI shape file is actually composed of
three separate files: a main file with a .SHP extension, an index file with a .SHX extension, and a dBase file with a .DBF
extension that contains the associated attribute data. The three files must have the same base name and follow 8.3 naming
conventions as shown in the figure below

Figure 2: Component of Shape file.
The main file (with a .SHP extension) is the primary component and its structure begins with a fixed-length, 100-byte header
containing information about the total length of the file, the file version, and the type of shapes it contains. This file header is
then followed by a list of variable-length records, with each record defining the geometry for a single ESRI shape[3]. An ESRI
shape might be a polygon that represents the political boundary of a country, a polyline that represents the path of a city street,
or a point object that indicates the location of a city. The figure below illustrates the format of a .SHP file. It contain record
file, header file with a header name constituting 100 byte. The other supporting file which are required are to collect
information about File number, File version, File code, File length and Shape type. We use class ShapeFileHeader to read the
content of the shape file which usually contain the address of 100 byte header file.
Reading Database Attributes
The dBase file associated with a shape file contains the attribute data and essentially represents a single database table. There
is a one-to-one correspondence between the rows in this table and the shape records in the .SHP file. A typical attribute field
that you may find in a dBase table is a field that identifies the name of the corresponding shape (such as a state or province
name).



Figure 3: Mapping between shape file and data base file
Methodology
The methodology adopted for the present work has been shown with the help of a flow diagram in Figure.

Figure 4: Designing Mobile Web Services
Detailed Planning
The methodology adopted for the thesis work is based on the following factors:
 Availability of the maps of MNNIT Allahabad with respect to the different functionality to be analyzed for the
establishment of a mapping application.
 Preparation of the mapping application for the purpose of designing the required functionality.
 Preparing Shape file using ARC GIS. The different layer that are prepared using this software are
a. Road Layer,
b. Railway Layer, and
c. Mnnit Poly Layer.
 Developing a Mobile Device Application and,
 Deploying the overall application on the client side that is on Mobile.
The approach is defined by the above flowchart in section. This flowchart indicates the process of work been carried out. Basis
for the work comprises of the literature review which is done to develop a methodology. This literature review helps to find
out the objectives of the work and further far. The Web Feature Service defines interface for describing data manipulation
operations of geographic features. Data Manipulation operations include the ability to
 Query feature based on spatial and non spatial constraints.
 Create a new feature instance.
 Delete a new feature instance.
 Update a new feature instance.

A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated
by a map server using data from a GIS database WMS specifies a number of different request types, two of which are required
by any WMS server:
After identifying the prime objectives the next was to carry out the detail analysis of the work to be carried out. The individual
parameters are identified.
Prepration Of Geo Spatial
Database
The following aspect has been considered for the design of the Geospatial databases for the present work: Firstly, the map for
MNNIT campus is scanned. Then, this has been used as the base map and its coordinate system has been adopted for
integrating other maps with this map. The image to image registration has been carried out to geo reference institute map.
From this scanned map, digitization of the institute campus, hostels and staff colony were carried out.After the completion of
registration, the on screen digitization process was followed for creation of various thematic layers. This is an important part
of project as different layers can then be derived as per the requirement of the study. This will help in populating the database
of the project. The various layers prepared in the present work are:-
Institute Campus Block,
Staff Colony Block,
Hostel Block, and



Road Map.

Figure 5 : Creation of Geospatial Database
Integrating Geospatial and Mobile Gis
The application runs on the user mobile phone and gets the required data from a database server on the wireless toolkit. In this
case, we keep the data that is the shape file on one computer (172.31.100.62). The application resides on the second computer
and we use Wireless Connection to access the data that resides on first computer.

Figure 6: Client Server Functions
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is assumed to be as the underlying protocol for communication between the client and
the server. The graphical user interface of the client contains a canvas for displaying the map. We have used the vector data
format in this application because vector graphics are better than bitmap images for querying, manipulating the data. The
WAP Gateway can optimize the communication process and may offer mobile service enhancements, such as location,
privacy, and presence based services. The WAP Gateway communicates with the client (WAP micro browser) using the WAP
protocols and it communicates with the Web Server using the standard Internet protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS.

Figure 7: The Overall Methodology adopted in this study.



RESULT

Figure 8: Road Layer: MNNIT

Figure 9: MNNIT POLY NETWORK

Figure 10: Deriving Information



Conclusion Drawn
Maps or Shape file have a definite role to play in a Mobile GIS environment. In their interactive and dynamic appearance they
will guide and assist the user in solving geospatial analysis problems. This can be proved with the help of this work that with
the increased availability of mobile devices, proper software and abundant data, maps can play these various roles anywhere
and at any time. It uses wireless network and communication network and communication protocol by getting the mapping
data from the server and displays shape file on the phone along with many functionality.
In traditional GIS, spatial object were primary focus while in Mobile GIS, the focus has been changed to a particular scene or
of a particular location

Future Recommendations
The future recommendation for this work can be in implementing:
 A dynamic Database Application for Mobile GIS.
 It may take a long time to establish a connection between a client and the server on a wireless network. So, the latency
time should kept minimum.
References
[1] Maruto Masserie Sardadi, "Quadtree Spatial Indexing Use to Make Faster Showing Geographical Map in Mobile
Geographical Information System Technology Using an Oracle 10g Application Server and Map Viewer
Applications,", IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, 2008.
[2] E.Poorazizi, "Developing a Mobile GIS for Field Geospatial data Acquisition,". A.A.Alesheikh and S.Behzadi, Ed.
Asian Network for Scientific Information: Journal of Applied Sciences, 2008.
[3] E. Mensah, "Designing a Prototype Mobile GIS to Support Cadastral Data Collection in Ghana," 2007.
[4] A. Vckovski, “Interoperability and spacial information theory. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems."
1999.
[5] M. J. Kraak,"Current trends in visualization of geographic data with special reference to cartography. Invited paper:
In Proceedings of the XXIIth INCA Congress Indian National Cartographic Association:" Convergence of Imagery
Information and Maps, vol. 22, pp. 319-324, 2002.


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